A first look at 7-Zip 17.0 Beta

Igor Pavlov, the developer of the archive program 7-Zip for Microsoft Windows, released 7-Zip 17.0 Beta to the public on April 29, 2017.

The new version of the program ships with a couple of changes, but the most important aspect of its release is that 7-Zip development continues.

If you look back, you will notice that only a few new stable version have been released in the past six or so years. The last releases, 15.x in 2015 and 16.x in 2016 were the first non-beta releases in years.

The new beta version does not necessarily mean that we will see a new final release in 2017, but it seems likely that the next version will be released this year.

7-Zip 17.0 Beta

First the basics: 7-Zip 17.00 Beta has been released for 32-bit and 64-bit versions of the Microsoft Windows operating system.

Interested users can download the beta version as exe or msi files from the official project forum. Please note that the beta will replace any previous version of 7-Zip installed on the computer.

Also, it is beta software; if you are on a production machine, you may not want to install the beta and wait for the release of the final stable version instead.

The changelog of the new 7-Zip 17.0 is rather short, and three of the four entries can be dealt with quickly as there is little to talk about:

The ZIP unpacking code was improved.

Igor made internal changes to the program's code.

Bug fixes. This may lead to fewer crashes.

Probably the most important feature addition is this:

7-Zip now reserves file space before writing to file (for extraction from archive). It can reduce file fragmentation.

Basically, what it means is that 7-Zip will reserve the required disk space for file extractions in that version and going forward. So, if you are about to extract that 4 Gigabyte large archive, space will be reserved by 7-Zip before the extraction begins. File fragmentation may slow down the loading of files, especially on platter based drives.

Closing Words

New features may land in future beta releases, or the stable release. The first 7-Zip 17.00 release indicates that development continues, and that is definitely a good thing. While I moved on to Bandizip, 7-Zip is still a solid alternative to any archiving program out there.

Now You: Which archiving software do you use, and why?

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Article Name

A first look at 7-Zip 17.0 Beta

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Igor Pavlov, the developer of the archive program 7-Zip for Microsoft Windows, released 7-Zip 17.0 Beta to the public on April 29, 2017.

Author

Martin Brinkmann

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Ghacks Technology News

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About Martin Brinkmann

Martin Brinkmann is a journalist from Germany who founded Ghacks Technology News Back in 2005. He is passionate about all things tech and knows the Internet and computers like the back of his hand.You can follow Martin on Facebook, Twitter or Google+

@Tinfoil_Hat: Yes thanks, I do know that one. macOS archivers are severely limited in terms of options and configuration, and the only thing coming close to WinRAR on Windows is BetterZip, and maybe Winzip for Mac (which is dreadfully slow). Keka is another one of those weird apps that auto-compresses and auto-extracts archives by default instead of opening/previewing them in the app itself. It’s one of those weird Mac quirks.

7-zip all the way. After an incident involving WinRAR failing to extract its own archives, two times in a row a few years ago. Plus, 7z achieves better compression. 7-zip is the first thing I install on a new Windows installation as some of my backups I manually restore are archieved and 7-zip makes extraction a lot easier, and I also used 7z format as I was sure that’s the program I will use.

I personally knew the development didn’t stop. I was looking after something related to 7-zip a while ago and found on the sourceforge forum (?) for 7-zip that the developer was activ ;)

Don’t know where you’re getting this from. 7z is fine for smaller archives, but it takes forever to extract for larger archives compared to the .RAR format. Plus the fact it’s free means there is less guarantee of data integrity during the archival process.

Imagine trying to back up critical data only to find out a bug in the 7z compression algorithm caused the wrong bits to be stored… This pretty much will never happen in commercial software.

been using 7zip for years w/o any issues. I do like winrar ability to insert files direct into archive as well as create recovery record but not worth (for me) the 30$ per pc they charge. both programs are good programs though.

Been using winrar so long it’s still #1. Because of Martin’s comment I tried bandizip but with the portable version there is no option for context menu. Is there a way to add it otherwise it’s of no use.

I’m used to 7-Zip, it’s open-source, it does what I need, and it seems to work fine. I use it frequently to unzip updated Nirsoft utilities, and I’ve used it a couple of times to unzip Firefox / Pale Moon extensions to hack them and then zip them back up. Occasionally I’ll zip a data file before I send it to someone.

I tried Bandizip when Martin first wrote about it, but the flat interface caused me to overlook a vertical scroll bar and miss the Windows Explorer context menu configuration options. Even after Martin pointed that out to me and I set up the context menu for Bandizip, I still didn’t see a compelling reason to switch. Bandizip is considerably faster at compressing and extracting and supports a few more archive formats (formats I don’t think I’ve ever come across). 7-Zip gets slightly better compression ratios. If I did a lot of zipping and unzipping of large files, I’d consider a switch, but for now, what I said at the outset obtains: I’m used to 7-Zip, it’s open-source, it does what I need, and it seems to work fine.

Good news. I like it for its ability to “open inside” files in an archive, by auto-detecting the file type. its UI could use a makeover though. Also, and I don’t know if it’s a .7z limitation, it could be made more error resilient (eg extracting from truncated archives)

One thing about 7-Zip is that it seems unable to directly add (drag-drop) & delete files to/from RAR archives, although the same procedure is possible for 7z archives. If I’m not mistaken, WinRAR can do so for any archive format.

A periodic issue I encounter with 7-Zip is that it could take an unreasonably long time to compress a set of many files as a 7z archive, because It keeps hanging for 5-10 minutes or more at 1 or 2 seemingly small file(s) of less than 1 MB each — say, when it is is 80% through the compression process — whilst hogging 25% of the CPU while compressing that 1 or 2 small file(s).

In such a situation, I cancel the compression (or if not possible, kill 7-Zip via Task Manager) & switch to Bandizip, which compresses the same set of files smoothly & relatively quickly, albeit with slightly lesser compression ratio.

About gHacks

Ghacks is a technology news blog that was founded in 2005 by Martin Brinkmann. It has since then become one of the most popular tech news sites on the Internet with five authors and regular contributions from freelance writers.